


A Kingdom of Isolation

by Nerd_of_Camelot



Series: Making Enemies Is As Easy As 1, 2... [2]
Category: Guardians of Childhood & Related Fandoms, Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Alternate Dimensions, Bitterness, Bunnymund is Paranoid, Emotional Hurt, Gen, Isolation, Jack Needs a Hug, Prison Dimensions, Wrongful Imprisonment, spans of time only immortals see as short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-02
Updated: 2019-11-02
Packaged: 2020-12-28 07:15:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21132770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nerd_of_Camelot/pseuds/Nerd_of_Camelot
Summary: Without any way to tell the true passage of time, it was easy to lose track. Easy to pretend he’d been here for far less time than he had been. He liked to pretend it had only really been a day or two.He also liked to pretend that, any day now, his ‘friends’ would change their minds and come to let him out.





	A Kingdom of Isolation

**Author's Note:**

> Finally got this part written haha ^^
> 
> Well, we finally get to see what Jack has been up to!

Sliding across the rough stone floor of this strange place, Jack was all but numb to the sting of the rubble scraping his cold skin. He was numb to pretty much everything beneath the more pressing feeling of betrayal. In all honesty, he was sure it would have stung more regardless of the physical numbness.

He scrambled to his feet as quickly as he could, turning back toward the large doors and feeling his chest constrict with abject terror when he realized Bunny was still holding his staff. He froze, eyes wide,  _ terrified, _ and it spoke to his state that his mind didn’t even consider making some kind of joke about the Spirit of Winter freezing in fear _ . _

“Nothin’ personal, mate.” Bunny said, right as he snapped out of his stupor and bolted for the doors, desperate not only to escape, but to get his staff.

He  _ couldn’t _ be without his staff. Even if he was still stuck in here afterwards, he  _ needed _ his staff. He had to have it, he couldn’t go on without it, he wouldn’t  _ live _ without―

The doors slammed shut in his face, and he slammed into them with more force than he’d thought possible.

It still wasn’t enough to budge them as he heard the outside locking mechanisms slam into place.

He was stuck.

He stared at the doors in disbelief for a long moment, unable to comprehend the truth. Had they really locked him in here? Had he really been trapped here by his friends? Without his staff? Without any way out? Without anyone to talk to?

Tears built in his eyes and overflowed almost immediately, crystallizing on his cheeks and shattering on the ground at his feet. His only comfort was the implication that his staff really  _ was _ just a focus for his powers. That he didn’t  _ technically _ need it to keep his powers.

It was a hollow sort of comfort.

His knees buckled under him and he sank to the ground, staring up at the large, imposing doors trapping him here, and for the first time in a very long time, he felt completely hopeless.

Bare feet padded over jagged rubble, the spirit’s entire body wincing with each step. It hurt, but it wasn’t enough to stop him. It didn’t hurt near as much as the still-stinging betrayal did.

He didn’t know how long he’d been trapped here. Without any way to tell the true passage of time, it was easy to lose track. Easy to pretend he’d been here for far less time than he had been. He liked to pretend it had only really been a day or two.

He also liked to pretend that, any day now, his ‘friends’ would change their minds and come to let him out.

That said, he knew it had been longer than that―he just couldn’t quite put a pin into exactly how long it really had been. Couldn’t decide if it felt more like a week or a month. It was hard to tell. He couldn’t very well see the sun from within this windowless fortress, so he couldn’t judge based on the sun’s cycles, and his internal clock had been broken since before he even died so he couldn’t judge based on that.

Not to mention he didn’t  _ sleep, _ and definitely didn’t sleep  _ regularly, _ so that was one more method that was useless to him in here.

He heaved a sigh and decided he’d paced enough for the day, sitting down heavily on the top step of a once-grand staircase. The air puffed out in a cloud, and as usual since becoming trapped it was a small, bitter comfort to see his powers manifesting without the aid of his staff.

He just wished that he could channel them better without it.

His powers were woven so deeply into the wood―he’d carried it for so long―that it was like an extension of himself. A part of him. He thought and his body reacted and his powers jolted through the staff and made his thoughts into reality.

That was how it worked, most times.

He thought; his staff directed.

But now he didn’t have it, and try as he might he couldn’t seem to muster enough gung-ho to try and learn how to control his powers without it. Not yet, at least. Maybe one day, if he got bored enough of sulking. Stewing in his own negativity. Wondering what, exactly, he’d done to make Bunny hate him like this. What he’d done to convince Bunny he was―

_ “―no better than Pitch, and deep down yer colder than anythin’ ya could ever make with yer powers.” _

Yeah.

That.

He shook away the memory of the fight for a second before drawing it back.

Maybe there would be an answer there, now that he’d distanced himself from the event enough. Now that he’d had time to cool his temper on the subject.

But he didn’t exactly have a photographic memory and nothing he recalled of that day could tell him why Bunny had gotten so hostile. It seemed like it started before that day. He couldn’t remember when it started.

Bunny had chilled out at some point after the Pitch Thing, and they’d started getting along, and then… Bam.

He didn’t know what had happened. He didn’t know what he did. What he said.

The last time Bunny had been that angry at him about  _ anything _ was the Easter Blizzard incident and at least back  _ then _ he’d been graceful enough to  _ voice _ why he thought Jack was Satan Incarnate. This time he’d just… Jumped right into telling Jack he was terrible, at some point. Never told him why. Just told him he “knew he was scheming”.

But Jack hadn’t been scheming anything… Unless a  _ prank _ counted, but every prank he’d planned, he’d already pulled off before Bunny started throwing accusations.

He always knew Bunny was paranoid, but this was… This was unprecedented. This was  _ ridiculous. _

He guessed he’d just have to hope that Sandy could talk some sense into the others about this. Get them to let him out.

Or maybe Bunny would only leave him here for a while, then let him out and hope he’d learned his lesson (whatever the lesson was meant to be).

…

Unlikely.

But he could hope.

Even if the word “hope” put a bitter taste in his mouth right now and made him want to vomit.

He cut his foot, sometime later. Could have been days. Could have been weeks. He didn’t know. Couldn’t bring himself to care.

Seeing no other options, he sat down on the stairs yet again and tried to summon up some ice to keep the swelling down and the bleeding slow.

Bloodstained hand pressed to his foot, he did eventually manage to lower the temperature of his palm enough that it became a functional icepack, but there was no ice or snow. Just cold.

That was fine, he guessed.

He had plenty of time to learn how to do this, apparently.

For now, this would just have to work.

A week and a half of unbearable boredom later, he finally decided to work on his powers.

(He only knew it was a week and a half because he knew how fast he healed under normal circumstances, and a cut like the one on his foot usually took a week and a half to scab over and then flake off.)

He had absolutely nothing better to do―except maybe try to sleep, which would end even worse than trying to get hold of his powers, he was certain―, so he heaved himself up from where he was lounging on the stairs and padded quietly down them into the only other room he’d explored.

The room was, he presumed, once a very beautiful ballroom.

Now the tapestries on the walls and the rugs on the floor were in tatters. The ceiling and walls were cracked, the floor cluttered with the rubble left behind by whatever cracked everything else. It was a sad sight, really, but he imagined whatever was beneath it probably had it much worse―there were more staircases leading down. Infinitely down, it seemed. There had to be something under the ballroom.

But that didn’t matter right now.

What mattered was trying to summon up what power he could and use it.

The Winds weren’t accessible in here, no matter how strong his connection to them was. He needed an opening to access the Winds. He couldn’t just spawn them into the room.

He could probably create his own breezes, but the Winds were off limits unless he could find a window or a crack wide enough to let a Wind through. Sure, drafts and breezes got through the main doors just fine, and probably the cracks too, but Winds needed wider access.

So that left ice and snow.

He took a deep breath, looked to a crater in the floor, and tried his damndest to ice it over.

He had nothing better to do, nothing else to waste his energy on, so he didn’t care if he redlined his power trying. He didn’t care how long it took.

If he could do it, even if it took him  _ hours, _ that meant he could train it like he’d trained himself with the staff. He could learn to do it faster.

After several minutes, a thin layer of ice crackled across the very top of the crater. A sweat had broken across his brow―an unfamiliar feeling, for sure. He wasn’t used to exerting himself to the point of sweating just icing something over… Or at all, really. He didn’t think he’d broken a sweat since before he died.

Maybe he wasn’t going about it right, he thought, even through the unhindered joy of knowing for sure at last that he could use his powers without his staff.

He was focusing so hard on the “without his staff” aspect of things that he’d forgotten he could try channeling through his own body, the way he naturally used to. The way he’d inadvertently trained himself not to.

He gave himself a quick rest, cooled himself back off, and tried again with a nearby crack in the wall, this time focusing his power through his hand. The moment he touched the wall, frost sprang out and curled over the crack―still paper thin, still fragile, but  _ fast. _

Slowly, he grinned.

He finally had something he could do.

Practicing with his powers became an every day thing―if it could really be called that, considering he still had no idea how long he’d been here.

He spent nearly all of his time in the ballroom icing over cracks and the little crater until he could do it from a distance without much concentration. Until the ice that sprang from his touch could thicken at a single thought. Until he could do with his hands and his thoughts what he could with his staff.

He found his hoodie collecting more frost than it ever had before as the days went by, and eventually his breath no longer fogged the air.

He took that to mean he’d dropped the temperature in the fortress pretty severely.

Cool.

He could work with that.

Once the novelty of using his powers without his staff inevitably wore off, he found himself once again at a loss of what to do. He could explore the rest of the fortress, he supposed, or make an attempt to force the doors open and escape, but… Well. He wasn’t sure what was actually safe for him at all.

Venturing downward could very well lead him to his second death, and trying to force the doors open was a daunting task in and of itself.

In the end, though, he decided he’d rather explore.

The fortress did not go infinitely down as he had expected, nor did it get more ruined the further he went.

In fact, he thought it fair to say the lower levels were in better shape than the upper ones.

He made an icy home of one of the lowest―a room spanning almost the whole floor that he decorated with spires of ice and only the most delicate of frost on the walls. His presence in the room alone would negate any possibility of it melting. He found himself to be something of a walking ice pack, at the moment. It was a wonder he didn’t crack with each step.

With the air of iciness the unchanneled use of his powers left about him, he found some things beginning to dull… Specifically, he found that Bun― no,  _ Aster’s― _ betrayal, while it still stung, simply made the icy feeling collect around his heart. And that was alright.

Feeling coldness toward the pooka was far preferable to still being upset about what he’d said and done.

Coldness meant indifference…

… And indifference was  _ still _ more than Aster deserved, frankly.

Jack would  _ like _ to just forget about him.

If he stayed here long enough he just might.

Time passed.

Jack grew used to his home; grew to somewhat enjoy the familiarity of it, though he did still feel somewhat claustrophobic when he recalled he wasn’t in here by choice. Felt trapped. Felt like a rat in a cage.

So eventually, he gave up on exploring and re-exploring his little underground palace and made his way up to the doors.

Could he open them?

There was only one way to find out.

He focused on them, eyes closed, and felt the outer locking mechanisms with a sort of awareness his ice had never given him when he used the staff. He could feel his power curl around the mechanisms, got a good mental picture of them.

A well-placed spear of ice knocked the biggest one, and as a result the smaller ones, out of the locked position. He heard it unlock, the noise echoing through the room, and he opened hopeful eyes. Took those last few steps to the door. Pushed, watching frost spread out from his palms in anxious patterns.

The door he pushed slowly swung open at his insistence, the ice spear that may have impeded its journey turning to snow before his hands ever came into contact with the door.

A triumphant feeling went through him, the Wind catching the door and pulling it the rest of the way open for him.

The feeling was not to last.

The very moment he saw the world laid out before him, he knew he had not escaped. This was not the view he’d seen when Aster was locking him away in here― _ that _ had been somewhere in the Carpathian mountains, if his memory of those mountains was accurate at all.

But this… This place, he didn’t recognize in the slightest.

And that meant that this place wasn’t in the human realm  _ or _ the Fae Realms, because he knew both like the back of his hand after spreading winter through them for 300-odd years.

Aster hadn’t just trapped him in an underground, windowless fortress―he’d trapped him in another realm entirely.

Though he felt anger fester somewhere under the ice at the knowledge, he took a moment to calm that fiery feeling. If this was the way things were, if Aster had decided to trap him in  _ another realm, _ he would make the most of it. Maybe there were others here?

He doubted it. Aster clearly didn’t have enough of a shrivelled up little heart in his cavernously empty chest to trap him somewhere with  _ other people _ . Somewhere he could make  _ friends _ .

If this was some wild bid to get him over his crippling fear of being alone, he was going to smack the absolute  _ shit _ out of that kangaroo when he got out of here. And  _ he _ was no better than Pitch―what a riot! At least he wasn’t going out of his way to isolate someone he knew feared being alone.

He had some  _ words _ for Aster when he got out.

_ And, _ he thought, a knuckle sandwich or two.

For now, though, he was going to explore this realm. See if there was anyone here. See if, by some chance, there was at least  _ someone _ for him to talk to.

The world laid out before him seemed to have an air of Spring to it. It reminded him of a fae he’d known once―a fae just a tad older than he was who seemed almost the embodiment of Spring, with powers that made flowers spring up around him like Jack’s made frost bloom on his clothes.

Conveniently enough, his name had been Blossom.

The last time he’d seen Blossom, it had been about a decade after the Spirit of Spring had been wed to the King of Winter and thusly calmed the conflict between Winter King and Winter Spirit.

Jack had never wanted to be in conflict with Boreas, but Boreas had resented his claim on the season of winter.

Blossom had, through means Jack wasn’t sure of even all these years later, managed to convince Boreas to drop it and, at the same time, the two had fallen quite happily in love.

He hoped they were still married.

He’d have to find out when he got out of here.

But Blossom, regrettably, was not the point―just something familiar he could put his mind on as he examined the realm laid out before him.

Given the mountainous nature of his current position in the realm, he was unsurprised to find a light dusting of snow at this height, but about twenty feet downward that light dusting disappeared. Everything below that level was green and lively. Evergreens gave way to birch and oak about midway down the mountain, the sun seemed to be either rising or falling somewhere behind him...

It was beautiful.

Beautiful, but terribly lonely.

He called a Wind and made his way quietly out into the realm before him.

He found, when thinking about it, that the only reason he had gone this long without his fear of isolation coming for him like an old enemy, was that he’d spent so long thinking his friends would come for him and, when that idea had finally faded, he’d already wrapped himself up in too much ice for the fear to have much effect. And then he’d become bitter, and the fear had promptly become something of a backseat worry.

It was kind of funny, really.

If this  _ was _ some kind of bid to get him over his fear, he hated to say it, but it was working. He didn’t feel afraid at all as he swooped around the realm, exploring and discovering. Finding vacant groves in the forest, abandoned villages and towns.

He felt quite at home, really, and he decided that this would be his realm.

Aster had already trapped him here. There was no reason he shouldn’t simply take the realm as his own now. There didn’t seem to be anyone else here, so there was no one to contest the claim.

As much as he wanted to change it accordingly, ravage the land with his snows and ice, he decided not to… Not yet. It may make him feel more at home, but he enjoyed the reminders of other seasons. And besides―maybe if he left it alone, the seasons would pass on their own and he would be able to track the time as it passed.

He could only wait to find out as the sun crawled into the sky and proved the idea that his home was to the East.

He would have to remember to return at some point. It  _ was _ his home, after all. His home while he was trapped here.

Eventually he found the edge of the Realm, which he expected.

He didn’t so much ram into it as he slowed to a stop as the Wind he’d summoned seemed to sense the edge and refused to let him actually hit it. Reaching out, he placed his hand flat against the barrier and watched as it rippled under his touch. It was invisible by all means, but where he touched it the light bounced off of it.

If he looked close enough,  _ hard _ enough, he could probably see the wards and sigils that formed the barrier.

As he had nothing better to do, he tried to look.

Once the wards became visible to him, he recognized them only in a vague sort of way. He’d seen them before, but he didn’t know what they meant. He just knew they had to be strong, because he was  _ pretty _ sure these were the same wards that surrounded the Winter King’s summer home.

Having made this observation, he had little else to do.

So he just stared harder and tried to see what was beyond the barrier.

… There was nothing.

Or, if there  _ was _ something, there was a ward preventing him from seeing.

_ Typical. _

As time passed, he came to the tradition of marking a wall in his home with a tally each Spring. More springs passed than he cared to count. He watched the tally grow and grow as years went by, watched the sun rise and fall each day, and wondered if he hadn’t been better off when he couldn’t sense or see the passage of time.

Nevertheless, he continued to mark the years.

He never bothered counting them at all. It would have been so easy to count the years, but he didn’t  _ want _ to. He would much prefer to wait until he eventually got out of here (whether he had to do it himself or someone else released him) to see how long he’d been here that he actually  _ knew _ of.

He spent his days decorating the inside of his home, strengthening weak walls on the upper levels with ice and allowing frost to cover the walls and floor. When he decided he didn’t like an old decoration―such as the decorations in his actual  _ home _ in the belly of the fortress―, he learned he could easily transform them without having to destroy everything and start over… Though he did still occasionally turn it all to powdered snow and remake things anyway. Having a clean canvas was nice, at times, and it wasn’t as if he was lacking any amount of power. He had a near bottomless well of it even now, even without the staff directing his use of it. Even when he was constantly causing frost on almost everything he touched.

Using as much as he could was like a game to him. He wanted to see how much it would take to deplete his power down to a level he couldn’t use it.

He’d never had to worry about it with the staff―not being aware of the power being his own made him a little more conservative with his use of it, after all. He’d never even scratched the surface of his reservoir before.

He still wasn’t so much as scratching it  _ now, _ if he was honest. The effort was a lot, sometimes, but his body got overwhelmed long before he pushed past what he was capable of, power-wise.

But speaking of overwhelming his body, he found over the years he was growing more tired in ways he hadn’t felt in a very long time. In very  _ physical _ ways, he was becoming exhausted. Quick to fatigue when he used his powers.

Eventually he gave into the feeling and the part of him arguing that nothing  _ bad _ could actually come of him trying to sleep―a bad dream or memory was hardly the worst thing he could experience, given the circumstances.

He made his way into the belly of the fortress, down to the floor he’d claimed as his home, and he shaped himself a snowy sort of bed behind a few ice spires off to one side. It was just right, after some minor adjustments to the snow to ice ratio of the creation, and he flopped heavily into it.

It had been a very, very long time since he had last slept, by now.

If he recalled, the last time had been before Blossom had even humored the idea of giving himself to the Winter King, and that had been a good fifty-ish years before he’d even been trapped here.

So, taking a deep breath and shifting to be more comfortable, he closed his eyes and focused on his breathing until he eventually, mercifully, drifted off to sleep.

He woke who knew how long later feeling quite refreshed and more relaxed than he’d ever been. If he’d dreamed while he slept, he didn’t remember it.

All the bitterness in his heart had somewhat flagged as he slept, it seemed, because the ice compounding his indifference toward Aster wasn’t as harsh, now. It wasn’t forceful, wasn’t a nearly painful presence. It was simply something that was there, holding the feeling in place for him until he was over the situation enough to be indifferent on his own.

He wasn’t sure that would ever happen, but he didn’t care much. Not really. As long as that ice around his heart kept the feeling in place, he didn’t have a  _ reason _ to care. The ice had everything covered.

He laid there in his makeshift bed for a long time, staring up at the frost-encrusted ceiling and considering what he would do now. Would he simply continue to train his powers? Begin plotting a way out of here?

The former was worlds more preferable―he had no idea how strong the wards trapping him here were, after all, and no matter how bottomless his well of power seemed to be he wasn’t sure if he could focus it well enough to break through the wards. That wasn’t what it was meant to be used for, after all.

There was also the previously unthought of  _ third _ option―exploring his little Realm and basically just burning as much time as he could in the process. It was unlikely, sure, but maybe Aster had a time limit on how long he’d leave him here. Maybe he just needed to screw around until that time was up. It was certainly more interesting than training his powers even  _ more, _ unless he did it while he was wandering, in which case the training could be pretty interesting too. Much bigger canvas out there, after all.

So when he finally lifted himself out of the bed and hitched a ride on a Wind up to the great hall, he had resolved himself to wandering around the realm a little on foot. His last venture out hadn’t awarded him much; no people, no animals. But it had been early spring, then, and  _ many _ years ago.

It was mid-summer, now, and he had all the time in the world to walk around and see about controlling his powers with even more of a vice grip.

He alighted on the stone floor, padding across the powdery snow and thin ice to the still-open doors. Looking out, he made the observation of the season―mid-summer.

The valley below him was green and lively, and faintly he could hear the cry of cicadas; the sun was low in the sky, painting everything in hues of red and orange so that the clouds hung soft and pink, wispy and not yet bearing any threat of rain―“yet” being the key word, as his memory told of this weather leading into monsoon season in the valley.

Memory was a lovely thing to have, he didn’t mind saying.

It allowed him to realize that, before, there hadn’t been any mammals or birds or bugs anywhere he’d gone. He hadn’t heard a cicada or frog or jay even once in all the time that he had been able to access the realm outside of his little fortress. And that meant that either he had been asleep for a considerable amount of time, or that the cicadas he heard had simply appeared here recently.

He took a slow, deep breath, and slunk out into the light of the sun. It felt warm in an instant, bathing him in light and, he thought, melting away some of his frost even at this altitude. It was summer, indeed.

He found himself smiling a bit as he began his trek down the mountain, following a winding sort of broken down staircase into the valley. It let directly to a little village with stone watchtowers and old torch sconces on the walls of each building. The houses were still in fair enough shape, built from stone and only just beginning to fall apart, and the single store held a weathered old wooden sign written in a language he didn’t understand.

He wasn’t surprised, though, given that he barely knew how to read  _ English, _ let alone any other language he didn’t already speak.

What  _ did _ surprise him was how well that sign and its engraving were holding up after all this time. It was clearly old, had probably been abandoned since long before he’d been trapped in the mountain, and in his experience wood didn’t last terribly long when exposed to the elements for quite that long. He’d have assumed it was enchanted against rotting were it not for the fact that it had clearly begun that process.

He peered into the store’s front window, seeing little else but the dusty glass itself, and decided he had nothing better to do than look, so he slid through the unlocked door and spent a while perusing the inside of the shop. There was very little to be found that was not long-rotted or of no interest to him, like weapons, but it was an adventure to explore nonetheless. A little staircase behind the counter led him to an upper-floor storeroom that seemed to double as someone’s living space.

That was even more interesting to look through.

Were he able to read whatever strange language that these people had used, he’d have had a heck of a time sitting there reading what was presumably the shopkeep’s journal. As it was, though, he was only able to examine it long enough to figure out it wasn’t a record of sales and inventory or anything of that nature. There were too many sets of letters that were unlike each other for that to be it, and the header for each new entry had what appeared by all estimates to be a comma, and appeared to be two words, one much longer than the other.

Honestly, at this point, he was bored enough that he’d almost try to teach himself this strange, runic language.

As it was, though, he knew he’d never actually manage it. He couldn’t even read  _ English, _ but at least he recognized those letters and knew what they were called. Understood them individually, but not all together. He only really knew how to read his name for a long time, and he’d come to recognize and therefore gained the ability to read the sign welcoming him home to Burgess, but other than that?

Well, he knew numbers and letters, but he couldn’t quite make sense of how to make those letters form words the right way.

… He had plenty of time to learn, now, of course, but no one around to tell him if he was right or not, and that made it too much of a fool’s errand to be bothered with.

What a conundrum.

He snorted derisively and made his way out of the shop, meandering quietly through the town and getting to know the prior residents a little bit in the process. You could tell a lot about someone by their living space, after all.

The houses that had a lot of faded old portraits were his favorites. There was a certain warmth and general feeling of safety in those houses. There was still love in almost every corner, and the ones where children had been present held ghosts of laughter. He could feel it in the air.

He sat down in one child’s bedroom and picked up a threadbare old stuffed rabbit from off the foot of the bed. He could feel, particularly in toys like this, how much fun had been had in the house. This one had clearly been a favorite. The yellow ribbon around its throat was frayed at the ends, the pink nose was worn to a shiny black on the tip, and the floppy ears were worn worryingly thin.

In comparison to the other toys in this room, the rabbit was in the worst shape.

It had been well-loved.

He smiled just a little and sat it back where he found it.

The worst part of it all was knowing that something had happened to the children in the village that wiped them off the map. Forced them to leave behind these much loved toys and comfortable, warm homes. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know, definitively, what had happened.

As long as he didn’t know, he could pretend the kids hadn’t been hurt.

He quietly continued on once he’d examined the entire village, wandering off down a path into the woods and listening to the cry of the cicadas grow louder. It was… Frightfully peaceful, really.

Horrible and wonderful all at once.

He spent a good several weeks wandering, and his mood hardly deviated from a somewhat half-hearted enjoyment of the surroundings and a bitter feeling of mourning for all of the empty, abandoned villages he found. He encountered animals during his wanderings, and that did lift his mood a bit as they all seemed to be able to see and hear him.

He spent a couple of hours hanging around with a small gathering of deer who all seemed rather fond of him, early on, and as the weeks passed he encountered more and more animals. That none of them were particularly scared of him was nice. It helped him to feel a little less lonely when a group of raccoons followed him around for a good six hours while he explored a town.

(What was a group of raccoons called, again? He knew a group of crows were a murder, ferrets were a business... Oh yeah. A  _ gaze _ of raccoons―or a nursery.)

He summoned up a little bit of snow for the gaze of raccoons that was following him around right before he left town, and they went absolutely  _ wild _ with it. They bounced around in it and played, and he slipped quietly away with a smile on his face.

But, eventually, he made his way back toward the mountain on a Wind, feeling somewhat mournful once more. He’d essentially searched all of the Realm and made friends with the animals within it, and he was still trying to burn time. He thought he might be better off sleeping through it, at this rate.

He alighted at the very top of the mountain, instead of heading back inside, and sat down, staring into his valley. It was late Fall, now―he’d walked all through monsoon season and the weeks after it. Late enough that the air was getting crisp, and at night frost was starting to build on the grass. Would he injure any of the animals if he were to try and summon up a brief first snow?

He considered it for a long time, until the sun sank below the horizon and the temperature surely sank with it.

He decided that a brief first snow wouldn’t do anything irreversible, especially if he did it now. They would all (except for the nocturnal creatures) be retiring and going to bed now. Most of them would have somewhere safe from the snow. He just had to keep a tight control over it.

He sucked in a breath and focused, casting out in his mind and pulling his power up. Clouds brewed, pulling in to darken the sky, and he pushed the clouds to spread over the rest of the realm. Once he felt them impact the walls of his prison, he released the breath. Flakes began to fall.

He made sure the clouds were light. Made sure they would dissipate by morning.

And  _ then, _ after watching the snow slowly sprinkle down for a couple of hours, until it no longer melted before it even touch the ground, he hopped down to the entrance of his home and decided he might as well go to bed, too. Maybe if he slept more regularly he wouldn’t sleep for so long.

He curled up in his cold bed, pushed down the part of himself yearning for warmth, and fell asleep.

He woke to something feeling very, very different.

It wasn’t obvious, at first, what the feeling was. Nothing in this realm ever really changed in a significant way. It was all frustratingly (mercifully) static. Everything played out the same way every year if he didn’t intervene. There were no blizzards in winter unless he made them―only mild snow. The seasons changed reliably, with the same feeling of the passage of time every single year.

But something certainly felt different.

He lifted slowly out of his bed, feeling oddly paranoid. Suspicious.

Was someone else here?

He strained his ears, searching through his mind for a reason why something could feel different like this. It almost felt the same way the houses in the village in the valley did. Like warmth.

Distantly, he heard a halting footstep.

**Author's Note:**

> Be sure to comment or leave kudos if you enjoyed! I might be writing this for myself but knowing other people like it is always nice ^^


End file.
